There was a time when a trip to the local Walgreens was a fairly comfortable experience. Growing up in Illinois, where the drugstore chain is headquartered, it felt like there was a Walgreens within walking distance of any block. As a child I’d make trips to the store to buy candy, school supplies or cough syrup for late night ails. In college the campus Walgreens was where I bought toiletries and grooming products throughout the semesters. Even post-grad I’d stop by the store the day after major holidays to buy extremely discounted holiday snacks. The store directly across the street from where I interned and worked for several years, featured a sushi bar, frozen yogurt machine and two levels.
I’ve probably made thousands of trips to local Walgreens over the years, and the experiences had always been pleasant, more or less. But things changed when I met Duane Reade.
Strike 1
When I moved from Illinois to the New York area, a lot of things felt new and different: the environment, the culture, the people. But one thing that was familiar was the neighborhood Walgreens. Actually, most of the Walgreens stores in the New York area are called “Duane Reade” because Walgreens purchased the NYC-centric pharmacy in 2010. The two brands are now practically indistinguishable. At any rate, I naturally became a regular customer at my local Duane Reade/Walgreens. But throughout my frequent trips to the place I started noticing something strange.
Every time I stepped foot in the store a canned female voice from the loudspeaker immediately demanded “security walk the floor.” Assuming the voice was an automated system that sounded every time someone entered the store, I didn’t think much of it at first. However, several months later I realized that the system wasn’t automated, and it didn’t sound for everyone. I thought it was odd, but still didn’t worry about it, giving the benefit of the doubt to a company I had trusted for so many years. But then I started noticing that security personnel or store clerks would observe the area any time the alert went off.
One morning I walked into a different Duane Reade location in Lower Manhattan and heard the spiritless voice again. Seconds later a store clerk appeared in the aisle I was in and asked if I needed help. That’s when I realized that the system was not automated, nor was it going off periodically. It was being activated at the discretion of employees.
Fed up, I emailed Walgreens corporate about the issue. Here is an excerpt from the email (dated June 1, 2015):
__________
Hello,
This is in response to a very bizarre and disturbing trend I’ve witnessed at several Walgreens/Duane Reade locations in the New York City and New Jersey areas.
Almost every time I walk into the Duane Reade store at [removed address] I hear the words “Security, walk the floor!” followed by a security officer or store employee eyeballing me.
The first ***several*** times this has happened, I didn’t think anything of it. I assumed this was an automated system that alerted periodically, randomly or every time someone walked into the store. But then I began to realize that this does not happen routinely or to everyone who walked into the store after me. It seemed to only happened (sic) once I** walked into the store and the security or store employee would appear near or in the aisle I was in!
The most recent time this happened to me was Saturday May 30 at [removed address] in New York City. After seeing an employee immediately come to the area I was in and ask me for help, I became fed up and annoyed. I googled “Security Please walk the floor Walgreens” and found that I am not the only one to experience this. Countless people have complained about this for the past 5 years, some even posting it on your Facebook page, which upset me even more!…
__________
A couple days later I got a call from the manager of my neighborhood Duane Reade. He apologized and confirmed that the system is activated by employees at their discretion in order to prevent theft. This meant that every time I heard that sound, typically upon immediately entering the store, an employee was alerting security that I seemed suspicious. He asked for feedback on improving the system and I told him that it was not just that store, but a brand-wide issue. I then wrote a follow-up email to Walgreens corporate re-iterating how I thought the “security walk the floor” system should be terminated across Walgreen stores and that a less-arbitrary system be put in its place. I can’t pinpoint the exact time, but at some point between the day I sent that email and maybe a year or two ago, I stopped hearing “security walk the floor” in any Walgreens or Duane Reade.
Strike 2
After that email exchange, my visits to Duane Reade had almost returned to normal. Occasionally I’d question whether a security guard was following me, and wondered why it seemed like more and more items were being locked behind plexiglass cases, including basic items like deodorant, shampoo and toothpaste. Though I didn’t think much of this and had never thought about what was being locked away or why–until a few weeks ago.
I found myself in the hair care aisle of a Duane Reade store in Manhattan. To my surprise a group of hair care products were locked up in one of the plexiglass cases. All of the items were brands geared toward African Americans: Shea Moisture, Cantu, Camille Rose Naturals, all under lock and key. It was a strange sight to see, so I took a few pictures before leaving the store.
The practice of locking up black beauty products is not new to retail, nor is the pain it causes black shoppers, who seem perpetually taken aback when they discover the loss prevention tactic in their neighborhood stores. In 2018 a woman, represented by women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred, sued Walmart for locking black beauty products behind glass shields. In January a Long Island woman, Patricia Fulford, came across locked beauty products at a Walmart there and shared her shock on Facebook, prompting the store to remove the items from the case. In May, black marketing expert Frederick Joseph posted video of alarms sounding when opening up plexiglass casing holding black beauty products in a New York City Duane Reade. And in 2016, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union initiated a campaign to get multiple Wamarts in Virginia to stop locking up black products.
The reasons the items are locked away may be easy to explain, but the shock and pain they cause black people is not. I shared a couple of the images I took on Reddit, which was met with ridicule, backlash and accusations of “race-baiting.” The main argument (and assumption) was that these items must be stolen often and thus require safeguarding. According to online forums for Walgreens workers, it seems store managers can use internal systems to track which items are stolen often and plan accordingly. Though consumers have no access to the data, and the optics of black products being excluded confuses many African American shoppers. Fulford, the woman who posted her experience on Facebook, may have summed up the confusion best when she asked “Why do black people have to ask to get shampoo or moisturizer while everyone else can “get their hair products off the shelf?” The answer to that question and any data backing it up are not always clear or accessible to consumers, though.
It’s not just consumers of black hair care products who get caught off guard. Customers are regularly shocked to find toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant and other items locked away in drugstores, especially Walgreens. But the items that are locked are not consistent between stores, implying managers get to decide, at least in part, what gets stashed and what remains free. For many black consumers seeing that a store has decided to create a display in which black products are separated from other products, then crudely locked up can feel personal. And it’s this disregard for consumer psychology that many might find troubling.
Consumers are sometimes aghast and confused at seeing products locked away because it’s not normal. Shoppers are used to being able to walk into a drugstore, pick up a product, hold it, read labels, compare sizes and interact with items before purchasing. It’s shocking enough to find common items under lockdown, but when the items in question happen to be targeted to ethnic minorities the event is even more jarring and, in ways, disturbing. While locking certain items away may prevent thieves from stealing a product, when the product in question is a specialty item geared toward an ethnic group its glaring exclusion forces paying customers to endure an unexpected level of humiliation and anxiety. This anxiety is something customers requesting access to other locked items like toothpaste or shampoo don’t endure. For black people, a simple trip to the drugstore turns into feeling profiled or a bitter reminder that blackness is stereotyped as being a potential threat first and foremost, despite honest intentions. In Fulflord’s case she claimed that after waiting 10 minutes for an employee to unlock the case, the employee then carried the item she wanted to the cash register instead of letting Fulford do it herself.
Ironically, black women, the target consumers for these heavily-guarded products, spend more in the hair care industry than other groups. The beauty industry is worth more than $4 billion and black consumers outspend in its marketplace, according to 2018 Neilsen data, with black women leading the way. In general, black people shop more frequently than the total market average, with purchasing power reaching more than $1 trillion dollars. And they are also more likely to shop at drugstores like Walgreens. Despite the figures, once they’re in these places many black people are sometimes forced to reconcile their purchasing power with a system that singles them out.
Are there no other ways to protect products than inadvertently isolating arguably the market’s most powerful consumers, or inadvertently perpetuating stereotypes by creating product displays that can be easily misinterpreted (locked black products = black people steal)? Trips to similar drugstores like CVS and Rite Aid, would suggest there are better approaches (more on that later).
Strike 3
Seeing products geared toward black people under heightened surveillance was not the last straw for me, however. About two weeks after I noticed the black product lockdown I walked into another Duane Reade store in New York. I’d been in this location many times before and had felt surveilled in certain aisles, but again, never gave it too much thought. The hair and skin care aisles, which are located near the store’s entrance, feel especially monitored at this location. A uniformed security guard typically hovers nearby. On this particular evening, as soon as I walked in a woman working there quickly stationed herself by the hair care aisle, where coincidentally the black beauty brands like Shea Moisture and Cantu are kept in a lockbox with other beauty products and shampoos. Then I noticed a uniformed security guard eyeing me and a small group of people (strangers to me) walking into the store. Being familiar with the store and where items were located I immediately thought about the locked-up products I photographed at the other Duane Reade location a couple weeks prior.
Being hyper-aware this time I noticed the security guard watching me. To be sure I walked to the next aisle and the guard had followed me. That’s when I took out my phone to record it. He brazenly watched my every move as other shoppers with items in hand literally danced by him. I walked back to hair care aisle and he followed, standing at the end of the aisle to observe. This is in the recording below:
I came into the store to buy things and walked out wondering how I would find a CVS, Rite Aid or discount store along my commute as an alternative to shopping at another Duane Reade. Between the “security walk the floor” alerts, the visuals of black products being put behind cases, and being blatantly shadowed in the store as other customers felt so at ease they danced around, the anxiety and discomfort made me realize that my Walgreens experiences were no longer like the ones I remembered as a child, a college student and young adult in Illinois. I consistently felt uncomfortable there, like shopping in an authoritarian marketplace in a Big Brother-esque dystopian future.
It’s not just me. The president of the San Francisco Board of Education Stevon Cook said a security guard asked him to check in his gym bag at the counter upon entering a local Walgreens. Dewayne Perkins, a comedian and former writer for Netflix’s “The Break with Michelle Wolf,” posted a video of one Walgreens store alerts directing employee assistance to every aisle he walked in. He told a manager and recorded and tweeted the exchange, during which a black woman who had been listening in also claimed that she’d regularly felt followed and profiled in the store. Meanwhile, a St. Louis man said he was searched by police after Walgreens employees accused him of stealing beauty products, even though he was there to purchase an item. The search came up empty.
Even celebrity talk show host Wendy Williams shared that she once heard a drugstore intercom call employee assistance to the aisle she was in and felt like she was being profiled. Although, she did not name the drug store:
And these are just anecdotes from the few who happen to have a platform wide enough and a career credible enough to share their stories and be believed.
Shopping while black can be a anxiety-inducing, uncomfortable experience. Whether it’s being followed around a store, ignored by commission-earning employees while other shoppers receive immediate attention, forced to ask for products instead of simply handling them like other shoppers, or sometimes being falsely accused of shoplifting before being detained, many black people are vulnerable to sloppy loss prevention tactics that seem to target them. Part of the black experience is constantly being reminded that blackness evokes all kinds of negative reactions and assumptions from people and that these assumptions interfere with black people’s attempts to live life in peace. That statistically black consumers are purchasing leaders doesn’t always carry weight. Like the “security walk the floor” alert or lockboxes for black products, careless theft prevention strategies disregard the role dignity and emotions play in paying-customers’ relationships with brands.
It turns out that racial profiling in loss prevention is a known issue that many retailers struggle to defeat. It’s such an issue that in 2015 representatives from top retail brands like Macy’s, Barneys and Walmart met in New York City for a symposium dedicated to discussing racially profiling shoppers. Consultants and trade publications like Loss Prevention Magazine have come up with techniques and training to help businesses avoid racial profiling, given the slew of lawsuits and high-profiled incidents around the issue. And according to employees, Walgreens has enacted new training and protocol designed to prevent racial profiling (and potential lawsuits), including strict policies against confronting or chasing shoplifters, which in the past has led to death and injuries.
Meanwhile, there is a ton of research that shows that black people are more likely to feel racially profiled while shopping in stores, and that such experiences often result in lasting negative emotions like anguish, anxiety, anger and sadness. Studies show that black people try to cope with these experiences in various ways, including not reporting or ignoring the problem altogether. One study showed that black shoppers may try to dress more affluently, refuse to purchase an item, or, conversely, decide to purchase an item just to prove a point. Another study showed black college students who felt racially profiled in retail stores often did not report their experiences. It concluded that in order to minimize or even eradicate the practice from retail more people needed to refuse to suffer in silence and share their experiences.
That can be easier said than done. The anxieties of shopping, especially while black, could be one of the many reasons more and more shoppers are skipping brick-and-mortar trips in exchange for online shopping. The Internet has given people a way to avoid the awkwardness of customer/clerk interactions and gives a little comfort to people scarred from being profiled in a brick-and-mortar store. And as more stores begin locking up basic items like deodorant and toothpaste, online shopping returns some of the freedom, agency and dignity consumers used to have when shopping in drugstores.
Yet drugstores exist to give access to everyday and sometimes emergency items that online stores can’t always provide in a timely manner. This means brick-and-mortar stores are most likely here to stay. The retailers that own them must reconcile the very real issue of racial profiling with a need to protect their merchandise. In addition to helpful hints published by researchers and trade magazines, I have a few suggestions of how this could work.
Ever since I saw black beauty products locked away at one Duane Reade location, I’ve been paying closer attention to the loss prevention tactics of similar pharmacy chains. Here’s what seemed to work:
- Security station: I walked into a Rite Aid drugstore in Manhattan (one of the ones that weren’t purchased by Walgreens in 2018). There was a uniformed security guard standing by the door. I noticed that the guard hadn’t followed me. Instead, most aisles featured intimidating CCTV monitors hovering above the shelves. The monitors flashed a message letting me that I was being watched. As I was leaving the store I noticed the security guard was no longer standing at his greeting station, but at a nearby podium instead, leaning over a screen with the images from all the cameras in the store. I can’t say for sure whether he had gone to his post to watch me shop, but I walked away feeling okay with the uncertainty.
- Kindness: Across the street from the Rite Aid is a CVS store. When I walked in a security guard in a bright yellow polo shirt labeled SECURITY, greeted me with warm hello and actually asked if I need help finding anything. He was kind enough to point me to the item, before later making rounds throughout the store. Whether or not the rounds were routine or a stealthy way to spy on me didn’t matter. I couldn’t tell.
- All or nothing: At a Walmart store in New Jersey an entire aisle of shampoo and facial creams were locked behind glass cases when I visited. It included brands like Shea Moisture, typically geared toward black consumers. Looming above the aisle was a CCTV screen, also bluntly warning me that I was being watched. Even though the locked items included brands geared toward African Americans, those products were not the only ones behind the glass–black consumers were not being singled out. The entire aisle was locked down.
Stores like Walgreens should take note. There are ways to protect products without making certain customers, especially paying customers, feel singled out or targeted. Given the research and anecdotes it’s a wonder why more brands haven’t figured out how to protect products without shocking, offending, or profiling customers.
If retailers don’t act fast, black and brown consumers can always find safer and more comfortable alternatives. Consumers might start shopping online more, or start going to drugstores where the guards are at least polite enough to greet them and say hi before secretly surveilling them.